Monthly Archives: January 2014

Some of you may have noticed that I have not posted since the middle of November. This is because I am tied up in a project that should be completed by the end of February. Even so, I do occasionally find posting that I would normally have posted with comments. The following is a posting by 21th Century Wire that I believe should be read.

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DIDN’T OUR MEDIA TELL US THAT SNOW WAS A THING OF THE PAST?

Andrew McKillop21st Century WireIt’s like we’re living in ancient pagan Greece or something.Only yesterday, British Prime Minister David Cameron insisted that the storms and floods causing havoc across his countrywere because climate change. Yes, that old chestnut.It’s one things for politicians to try and leverage public approval by flying the flimsy climate banner. You expect that. But no such leeway should be given to the media, as it is supposedly their job to inform the masses of facts, not mythologies.Politically Correct ScienceLet’s trace this tragic tale to the beginning. Seemingly decades ago, not 13 years, the UK Independent newspaper started the new century with the goal of becoming a world leader in government-approved, corporate-friendly global warming propaganda. Its chief warmist and green scribe, Charles Onians, fired the first climate salvo in a March 20, 2000, in this leading article:“Sledges, snowmen, snowballs and the excitement of waking to find that the stuff has settled outside are all a rapidly diminishing part of Britain’s culture”.The Independent was soon followed by other UK papers, US papers, and European papers, and their broadcast media, in a permanent propaganda blitz to take “the warming thing” to the ultimate limits of childlike hysteria and stark distortion using the uncertain science of “the CO2 hypothesis”. The propaganda onslaught was stamped with the “warmist” hallmark of elite condescension and smug conviction that ordinary mortals are much too stupid to understand this “scientifically proven” crisis.In what would become a typical example of “warmist” genre material, Charles Onians in 2000 cited David Viner, a researcher at the later-infamous climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia – the Home of the Hockey Stick – who told the unscientific masses that very soon “winter snowfall will become a very rare and exciting event”. And as for homeless sleeping in the gutter, not so many would die in the night – posing an existential crisis for English Middle Class Morality! By 2006, the UK Independent was regularly carrying junk science hysteria from ‘Gaia” author James Lovelock, a key example being his claim that “Billions of persons will die before the end of the century from global warming”. Since 2012, ‘Jim’ Lovelock has completely retracted and denied his warmist convictions, and tiptoed away from the train wreck of elite propaganda.Always Go FurtherAl Gore, chief promoter of the global warming scam with Rajendra Pachauri, always went further. Their propaganda onslaught mixed and mingled pure egoism with a frenetic drive to make millions for themselves and enrich their fellow conspirators, through an ultra-tenacious promotion of any “carbon-linked” cash-grubbing scheme. Showing what the business press calls “initiative and drive”, they promoted anything ranging from investment and trading scams, through government tax and corporate subsidy scams, to lurid books, films and TV documentaries.THE CHURCH OF CLIMATE CHANGE: Gore and Pachauri guide the mass cult off their intellectual cliff.

Al Gore repeatedly said, in print, “the Arctic will be ice free by 2013”. Gore made this claim in print in 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009.

And it didn’t happen. In fact the Arctic ice cap’s surface area increased by more than 25% in 2012-2013. The much-larger Antarctic ice cap also increased, by about 5% using NASA data. NASA, which is a fully warmist institution peddling the “CO2 hypothesis”, has been forced to admit the Antarctic ice sheet is now at its largest since it started regular satellite monitoring in 1979.

Media spending on the permanent propaganda campaign has been massive, and a fantastic misappropriation of public money where this concerns state-owned media. Obsessionally and expensively filmed summertime-only shots of polar ice melting – which the “climate correct” media has stuffed down our throats for a decade – are however now likely to be retreating to where they belong. To the trashcan of history and to empty film theaters, and late night TV doc boredom for the almost-asleep.

The warmists set up and tirelessly milked the global warming cash cow for all it could yield, but now it is Game Over time. Their great scientific scam may now be what it always scientifically was, a Cuckoo Theory which evicted all other possible theories of why the climate changes.

The Latecomers and Still Hopefuls

As plenty of writers including myself have explained plenty of times, the “CO2 theory” is scientific folk history and was junkscience from the moment it started – in about 1795 with Joseph Priestley and his lurid vision of Phlogiston Terror. To him worse than Al-Qaeda or mustard gas in the trenches of World War I, Priestley thought “phlogiston” could cause a mass dieoff of English industrial workers exposed to woodburning and coalburning fumes! But nobody had to believe it.

Today, only the most primitive minded and witless “warmists” soldier along, spouting idiocies in the hope the under-informed and the lazyminded will continue to buy their junkscience.

If all goes according to plan, Hollywood icon Leonardo DiCaprio will blast into space on the maiden voyage of Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic “spaceship” this year. Incredibly enough, Messrs. Branson and DiCaprio style themselves as environmentalist celebrities with the elite mission of warning us there is a “coming ecological catastrophe” if we fail to address the carbon crisis.

Simply because they have garnered a large amount of money over the years, one way and another, their “commitment to fighting climate change” is called praiseworthy by brain-dead media, committed to “celeb worship” even as it backs off and away from the Global Warming scam. Richard Branson, despite all his attempts, is still far behind Al Gore in “warmist” cash-grubbing so he is active wherever that might turn a penny.

Branson claims he was “turned on” to Global Warming by ‘Jim’ Lovelock in person – the same Lovelock who has abandoned the scam. Branson is the founder and CEO of the “Carbon War Room”, an outfit advocating punitive-high energy taxes, which therefore has fawning support from Big Energy and Big Government, but his big hope is that “low carbon space travel” can become his new profit center. His one-liner to critics that space travel and carbon hysteria do not seem to mix, is that his brand of space travel is (very) Low Carbon. Cited by Wall Street Journal, 7 January, he has claimed: “We have reduced the [carbon emission] cost of somebody going into space from something like two weeks of New York’s electricity supply to less than the cost of an economy round-trip from Singapore to London”.

As we know, this concerns low-orbital short-period flight in the upper atmosphere, and nothing to do with real space travel, but coming from a “Global Warming ikon” we must accept there is always massive exaggeration and distortion. It is New Normal. On the other hand, we do not need to accept the plain, straight lying.

According to the US FAA-Federal Aviation Administration, also cited by Wall Street Journal, its own environmental assessment of the launch and re-entry of Virgin Galactic’s spacecraft says that one launch-land cycle will emit about 30 tons of carbon dioxide, or about five tons per passenger. That is around five times more than the carbon footprint of a round-trip flight from Singapore to London. When the support and infrastructure energy costs of the entire Virgin Galactic operation are added, including high-atmosphere flights by tracker and support aircraft, the total carbon emissions rise to about seven times more than an average round-trip flight from Singapore to London. The FAA says that for each passenger on a single trip using Virgin Galactic their total energy burn will be at least twice the energy an average American consumes in a year.

When or if Branson’s tacky low-orbital “space” flights backed by the United Arab Emirates and their “low carbon” petrodollars ever get their celebrity cargoes out of the Earth’s gravity field, a trip to Mars will be obligatory. Here, they will find an atmosphere that is about 96% carbon dioxide (or 960 000 parts per million), and they will be able to smugly gurgle, for the short time they can still breathe: “We told you so!”. Back on Earth however, a little modesty, or at least the prospect of lawsuits for open lying – which is cited by observers as one reason ‘Jim’ Lovelock and his namesake James Hansen have backed away from the Warming scam – call on them to give us a rest and to please pipe down.

Keeping The Baboons Warm

Keeping the warmist gravy train rolling – whatever happens in the real world – is rapidly reverting to whence it came. Big Government, the UN system, the nuclear power and alternate energy industry, and financial opportunists always looking for a new scam. To this motley crew, we have two major bit-part players – government-friendly media and Mr and Mrs Average Informed Citizen – so well-informed they are both easy prey for the lying propaganda from the Carbon Purists. But neither, in fact, can be counted on by the warmists, as they will soon find out.

Any kind of historical perspective on atmospheric science and the origins of the “CO2 hypothesis” was until recently deliberately kept out of the media. Any reference to “alternate theories” was trashed by the media as negative, anti-science, badly-intentioned and probably corrupt. Global Warming of the Al Gore variety was to the west what Lysenko was to the USSR of Stalin. Any mention of the relatively large, sometimes outright large changes of world average temperatures over the last 1500 years was derided by warmists – because there was warming in 1980-2000, by a few fractions of 1 degree celsius, we have a crisis. Only “carbon effluent” in the atmosphere could have caused this! What else?

The media, like public opinion is doing what it always does – it moves slowly but surely like a Titanic-crushing iceberg, breaking up as it goes. The media at this moment is packed with scientifically flaky, superficially plausible stories about how global warming causes record cold and massive snowstorms in New York, but also that until the magic date of 2065 global warming will be “net positive” for human beings, while Mr Obama has told us (although we don’t have to believe him) 97 percent of scientists still think crisis-style warming is a reality.

In a late 2013 report, the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism said that most media coverage of climate change now emphasises uncertainty, and an increasing number (25%) focus on the “positive opportunities” global warming could or might bring. Global cooling, however, remains completely banned from mainstream media, except as freaky tidbit, despite it being at least as possible that we have cooling, as warming, in a time frame stretching to 2065.

Keeping The Baboons Stupid

Admitting that we don’t know what happens in the Earth’s atmosphere, therefore we can’t know how climate changes is affecting global temperature – is the ultimate blog-material. It is the no-no option and “just in case”, or “simply by precaution”, so we have to reject that possibility. Time is limited and Al Gore needs cash. Propaganda overkill arrived. Now Gore’s pews are empty, and we’re left with hit-and-run street preachers.

One key benefit of the comeuppance for global warming, losing its status of “unquestionable” except by misfits, psychotics and the badly-motivated, is that climate change will be able to emerge as the real subject of interest.

We are likely near the point, now, when the blindest and most faithful cult followers of global warming and the “CO2 hypothesis” will have to admit they’ve been sold a pup. The computer-modeled, science-correct, politically-correct theory of man-made CO2 causing global warming, or its second-best rebranded title of “climate change”, or its third-best of “extreme weather”, was a 10-year trip to oblivion along the well-trod path of Dumbing Down. Global Warming was Dumb with a capital D.

Gore-theory proved nothing at all. The sole benefit of the waltz down Propaganda Lane is that we know climate is changing but we don’t know why. Being able to admit that is difficult for high intellect baboons.

Baboons are in fact a lot more results-oriented, and have much less time to waste on trivial pursuits than human beings. For that reason they do not invent new enemies and they make do with ones they always have had and know well. Who are real. The Global Warming crisis movement – an example of mass hysteria – invented an all-new enemy for Mankind, called Mankind.

Also called misanthropy and being more than a little dated, the warmists pushed the misanthropy button so hard we were asked to think “we” are destroying our planet – unlike Al Gore with his personal Gulfstream 5 jet, his expanding waistline and penchant for fillet mignon and massage parlors with happy endings – and unlike Richard Branson and his Virgin jetliners, because average humans use far too much fossil energy, but Branson and his Hollywood playboy pal are apparently “saving the planet” for those of us who don’t own our own island in the Caribbean.

This mental constipation only has one logical readout – that human beings should operate a mass cull or Die Off, to prevent us from killing the planet – which belongs to very nice persons like Gore and Branson. Even low-IQ baboons would reject the embarked logic inside this mental masturbation. They would much prefer serious endeavors like looking for rapidly-cooling potatoes in the snow.

It’s officially an evolutionary crisis when the feral monkeys start looking smarter than our jet-setting monkeys in suits. Maybe it’s time to put the feral baboons in suits and ties, and let them realize their true Darwinian potential in Westminster, Brussels and Washington.